Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Recipe

Warming up for their annual email-go-round re the Red Sox (and why does the person who lives two miles from Fenway Park care the least?), my scattered cousins and siblings have all been swapping variants on the chocolate bread pudding we were all served as children. Heeding SheWho's suggestion that providing recipes is the way to make a blog really pop, I hereby give you my mother's version of the recipe as preserved by my brother Rand:

25 comments:

Oh, Roger, I love you. A recipe! you are so indulgent.I think you hit the nail on the head with a lot of talented writing but not a lot of really good books out there. That's the problem I have with all the awards. In practice, I like all the awards because they mean some writer is going to get to write and not work for Walmart for another year. But, you know what happens, with all the emotion and speeches and ceremony, before you know it, people get worked up to a state where everyone believes their own press releases and some pretty adequate books get made into something much more and no one is saying the emperor isn't wearing any clothes because by that time everyone believes he is. But then, I think too that your sense of this being any kind of new phenomonon is skewed because you have to wade through so much of it. Certainly in any time there have been a lot more krill than whales. Think of Louisa May Alcott and all the sensational literature that was the rage when she was writing. A lot of it probably pretty workmanlike and decent, including her own, a lot of it bad, none of it really enduring. How many Little Women come around in one age. Anyhow, it kept her in hairpins. I think if we would just give awards out each year for the most adequate stuff around, I would be okay with that. When a really terrific book comes out, the award is so secondary to the experience that writer has already had. And the reader too.

Call Tratoria del Giorno on 1st Ave, have them deliver with a side of mashed potatoes and spinach, and a starter portion of risotto.

Roger, forget Fenway. You lived two blocks away from Wrigley Field for years and never went to a game. And what do these recipes have to do with the Red Sox? The recipe I associate with the Red Sox is eating a Hoodsie on the floor in front of the TV when the game was on, while the family dog sat in the only good chair in the room.

Now. About the posts below, Roger raised some excellent questions...but I'm not answering any until someone back home can make sure I'm not going too public. But it's always a very tough choice to let a book go out of print, and I don't remember that emotional part, at least, changing in the last 20 years.

By the way, have any of you been told a book is getting "print on demand" status?

No, no, no, we are not doing veal, we are doing lamb in keeping with the no sheep but Roger is a lamb theme.I wonder if the reason there are so many YA books is that kids scoot right out of childhood in about grade four and there are no children to write transendent stories for.If Little Women were published for the first time today would it be a YA book and how would that change how we come to it? I think YA and I think nasty teens, problems, angst. Would I begin to worry about Mr. Lawrence next door and what the little women were using for birth control?

Well I don't think it's appropriate to discuss the eating of such cute things (with faces) as lambs here on a children's lit blog. I thought your favorite book was Charlotte's Web in which the plot revolves around a meat-animal NOT being eaten. In my years in retail, I've succeeded in avoiding any dealing with cooked dead animals -- with however an exception. Back at my store on Navy Pier in Chicago I did do a roaring business in bug-candy. Lollipops with real bugs in them. (See www.hotlix.com) SO much fun having Grandma dare grandson to eat the cricket lollipop, or sister dare brother. When I moved to Eric-Carle-land, however, I was not able in good conscience to continue to sell these products. Could I honestly sell "The Very Quiet Cricket" alongside a display of Cricket Lick-it lollipops?

So -- no recipe from me, but if you're looking for a terrific party favor, I can guarantee that the Hotlix suite will wind any party up.

Well, I can top both of you. When we moved to the country and my girls were little, they were invited to new friends who have about a thousand sheep and it was lambing season. They were taken to the fields to pet and play with the new lambs. And then taken in to have lambchops for dinner. No realist like a farmer. Neither of them have eaten lamb since. Andy, I just KNEW you were a vegetarian. I would have bet good money on it.

Or, as their friend, age seven at the time, said as we related the story to her and she had lambs of her own, 'So sad, and yet so tasty." As I say in my new book, lamb of God indeed. That should be mankind's motto.

April 6, 2005 - Oscar-winner Robert Redford has signed on to the voice cast of "Charlotte's Web," to be directed by Gary Winick and starring Dakota Fanning ("War of the Worlds"). Redford takes on the role of Ike, the horse who's afraid of spiders. Other stars lending their voices to this big screen version of the classic E B White story include Julia Roberts, Oprah Winfrey, John Cleese, Steve Buscemi, Cedric The Entertainer, Reba McEntire, Kathy Bates, Thomas Haden Church and Andre Benjamin (Andre 3000.)

This movie is due out in a few months, I gather. I guess it will lead to either a new fad for pet spiders, or for excessive use of adjectives.

Getting back to cooked dead animals, yesterday I read Chris Raschka's Arlene Sardine to my current crop of 4th graders. When I got to her death the whole group burst out in hysterical laughter. As Roger may recall, that didn't happen with an earlier group (as I wrote about them in my one Horn Book article:).

So, never mind about 4th graders considering the March girls' birth control, I'm taken more by their increasing capacity for irony (and cooked dead animals) --- there's perhaps the leap into YA.

Well, the "deadness" of anything anthropomorphizable is up for grabs of course. Food has traditionally been talked about as "alive". "Oh I wish I were an Oscar Meyer Weiner...everyone would be in love with me".

Now, it's true that some people do feel sure they'll be loved more after their death than they were during life (those who talk too much on blogs may be right about this, and so now I shut up.)

When you write: "but I havegone all Martha and used Ghirardelli with great results" do you mean Stewart or Parravano? This is even more important to me than the correct classification of graphic novels....

Monica, I'd be curious to know what your fourth graders think of "Tadpole's Promise" by Jeanne Willis, an irreverent send-up of all those sweet picture books about friends who remain friends, even after major changes (e.g. metamorphosis).

Our Zolotow Award committee found that K-2 kids found it hilarious, whereas adults were mortified. I wonder if by fourth grade they'd start to fall into the mortified category.

You see, posting a recipe is like inviting people into dinner. They don't sit around all evening talking about the food, but they are glad it's there. Like those businessmen in A Christmas Carol who don't mind coming to Ebenezer's funeral but they must be fed.

KT, thanks for reminding me (and, Roger, thanks for giving me this place to ignore you and talk to KT) about Tadpole's Promise. When they laughed yesterday I immediately thought that I had to bring it in to read to them --- and of course forgot. But now I've got a little stickie on my Powerbook and will hopefully remember. I'll let you, Roger, and Roger's blog readers all know what happens!

Roxanne(AKA) upon discovering I'd read Arlene Sardine read it again to my class this morning (after we finished discussing the SNOW) and I immediately followed up with Tadpole's Promise. Got a laugh, but I think their hearts are with Arlene!

Now I'll be curious to watch and see if they read them on their own and to each other.

About Me

I've been the editor in chief of The Horn Book, Inc, since 1996; previously editor of The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books and a children's and young adult librarian. Received my M.A. in library science from the University of Chicago in 1982 and a B.A. from Pitzer College in 1978.